


Lotus Lying

by A_Song_to_Say_Goodbye



Category: Twilight Series - All Media Types, Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: Abusive family dynamics, Enormous Consent Problems, F/M, Hinted Sexual Assault, Meyer I Hate You and Your Face, Postpartum Depression, Suicide, This is Not a Happy Fun Fic, Trigger Warnings, death of an infant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-21
Updated: 2018-12-21
Packaged: 2019-09-24 05:38:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17094875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Song_to_Say_Goodbye/pseuds/A_Song_to_Say_Goodbye
Summary: Esme Cullen and the masks she uses to protect herself.Tie-in standalone to Sleepwalker





	Lotus Lying

**Author's Note:**

> Written at the request of the Tumblr user @kiradax (who I think is now @backaff?) a . . . long time ago. Oops.
> 
> You can find the notes for this fic [ here ]()
> 
> TRIGGER WARNINGS: death of an infant, postpartum depression, suicide, enormous consent problems/hinted sexual assault, abusive family dynamics, and unhealthy relationships in general. This is full of really creepy stuff. Please do not read if any of those might be detrimental to you and your wellbeing. The fic notes include some more information about the warnings, if you want to know more.

When her baby dies, Esme thinks the world has ended.

Staring blankly at his small, horribly still body, she can mark the exact moment that she stops believing in a good and just God. A good and just God would not kill such a small child, one too young to be guilty of any wrongdoing.

She does not understand how this could be possible. She cannot comprehend how she could’ve failed her son so badly.

Could it be because of his father? she wonders, and shudders at the thought of Charles Evenson. Could her baby have inherited his father’s sins? Or could God have killed her son to punish her abusive husband? But he did not even know she was pregnant, and it would be no punishment to that man for his child to die, so to accept that would mean believing that God is not omnipotent.

Either way, the concept of God is incompatible with the death of her son. She wonders, if He exists, that he knows he has lost a believer. She wonders if it matters.

To set His existence on the life and death of her child is a very self-centered view of things, but she doesn’t really care.

.

.

.

Having lost her son and her faith, it makes sense that she doesn’t care about her life either.

Her head is numb and hazy, shrouded in a cloud of black fog that wisps treacherous and gentle into her head whenever she thinks she is about to escape. Her thoughts keep warping back to her baby, the image of his dead body, thoughts about the man he could’ve become. Lost inside her head, she is startled when people speak to her and jumps at sounds.

She is a wreck. She is falling apart. She is absolutely useless.

When she first escaped from Charles Evenson, she felt like a lion. She felt like she owned the world. But now she is only a scurrying little mouse.

The teachers and students all know something is wrong. She can hear them whispering about it, staring at her. Some of them approach her, trying to help. But they cannot lift her out of the fog. She is unable to take even the slightest step out of the darkness.

She doesn’t know what to do.

She is so weak.

.

.

.

Jumping is the easiest thing in the world.

It’s the falling, the waiting that’s hard.

.

.

.

The pain comes first, once she’s awake again.

It sears through her like she’s been burned alive, lighting every nerve on fire. If she could move her jaw, she would scream. Perhaps this is Hell, she thinks dazedly. Is this her punishment for being a bad mother? Letting her baby die?

She gradually becomes aware that she’s lying down on something cold and hard, with the smell of hospitals and something nauseating in the air, so it may not be Hell after all. Hell is not supposed to make her shiver. Hell is not supposed to smell of rot.

But just because it is not Hell does not mean the pain hasn’t faded. She is in desperate need of a distraction from the fire, so with great effort, she forces open her eyes, trying to find something she can focus on.

At first, everything is blurry. Then a patch of colors becomes a blessedly familiar sight, and it’s enough to bring the faintest touch of a smile to her face. The face of Dr. Carlisle Cullen wavers above her.

The hazy images of running around the farm and climbing up trees come with him. All of a sudden, she remembers being sixteen and infatuated, carefree and happy in the flush of her youth. The days were all sunshine, hard work with her family, her half-formed dreams of being a teacher. The smell of the fields and the warmth of the spring wash over her, displacing the dank, rotting air and coolness of whatever slab she’s lying on. For a moment, everything is easy and nothing hurts.

Then the pain comes back, all in a rush. She still can’t move her jaw, but her eyes roll back in her skull with the force of it, and she makes a half-moan of agony in the back of her throat.

Dr. Cullen puts his mouth to her ear, perilously close to her lips. She thinks she might have even blushed, but she can’t tell because of the aching in her face. “Esme, don’t worry. I’m going to fix you,” he whispers, his eyes shining with a dark intensity.

Fix her? Can she be fixed? she wonders. The idea is wonderful, but how could it be possible to fix something that’s broken as badly as she is? Then again, if anyone can do it, it would be Dr. Cullen. The miracle worker who fixed her leg, who made everything go quiet again for a moment.

Still. She doesn’t like that look in his eyes.

But in the end, she doesn’t have a chance to say anything about it, to voice all her lingering doubts. Before she can muster up the strength for anything, his lips are sliding down to the hollow of her throat, brushing over her skin. Like a kiss.

The room suddenly seems so much colder as she tries to figure out what he’s doing. Shivers run through her body, and she cannot tell if it’s merely from the temperature. She wants to move, to at least try and get out the word, “Wait,” but she’s completely frozen. Every ounce of strength left in her is locked away in her limbs. She’s never felt so small.

And then he bites.

.

.

.

Everything is a blur for a while. She remembers nothing but the pain and the red.

.

.

.

At last, Esme awakens to the dying light of sunset rippling above her on a white ceiling. She hisses and shuts her eyes, burned by the startling intensity of the dim light. There’s so much sensation against her skin that she would swear it’s crawling with insects, and the soreness of her rough, dry throat is so acute it feels like someone’s slowly, repeatedly rubbing sandpaper inside.

Someone pushes her lips apart and tips something cool against it. Water floods her mouth, and the change in temperature is so sudden that she nearly spits it out in shock.

That’s when she realizes the pain is gone. She can move her jaw now, and her head and her arms and legs. She has control over her body again, even if everything around her is so strong that she doesn’t to use it.

But the realization rings strangely hollow, and that’s how she knows the numbness is still there.

She drinks down the water. Lesser pain is still better, even if it does not fill the hollowness. And once her throat feels less like a desert, she tries to open her eyes again, little by little. It’s less painful this time, now that she knows what to expect, and as her vision slowly adjusts, she begins to see the things in the room. Including a very familiar back.

She manages to croak out, “Dr. Cullen—”

“Please, Esme. Carlisle.”

She does her best, and she isn’t sure whether it’s the pain that turns her voice into a plea. “Carlisle. What’s going—?”

“I’ve turned you into a vampire, Esme,” he says, looking out the window. “It would’ve been such a tragedy for the world to lose your beauty,” he explains, and lays a hand on her shoulder. She jumps at the sudden sensation, but tired as she is, it comes out more as a wince.

Then he turns around and smiles, and it’s so easy to forget when she sees the way he’s lit up by the sunset. All the years fall away from her, and she’s a blushing, giddy girl who’s so in love that she doesn’t even remember she has a broken leg. Any thoughts of vampires fade from her head just like that.

But once he leaves, the warmth goes away, and her mind starts to function again, unclouded by the blissful haze.

Oh. He fixed her body. She looks down for a moment, then closes her eyes and puts a hand to her chest, feeling the solid strength of the rhythm beneath it.

She thought he would fix her heart.

.

.

.

Then she meets Edward, and she has a son again.

(She does her best to ignore the things he does, and it’s so, so hard. But he’s her  _son_ )

It turns out having a son does not fix her either.

.

.

.

She tries to fill the emptiness with beauty, at first. Makeup, jewelry, fine clothes, all the luxuries that glittered tantalizingly just out of reach when she was a little girl. She thought they would never be attainable to her, too expensive to afford and too impractical to be worth the money. But it’s easy for Carlisle, who doesn’t care how she spends his money. After all, he saved her because he thought her beautiful, didn’t he? The more beautiful she looks, the happier he is.

It helps, at first, the thrill of the newness and the freedom to buy things without looking at the price. Not having to budget every cent. But everything is fleeting. Soon, everything fades back to grey.

She didn’t know it was possible to be this empty.

.

.

.

There are so many questions Esme wants to ask him.

_Why did you bring me back when all I wanted was to die?_ But she’s too afraid he’ll be angry and leave and take the goldenness away with him, and it’s been her only respite since her son died. So she stays quiet.

_Why didn’t you give me a chance to answer?_  But then he will ask her what her answer was going to be, and she will have to say yes to avoid his fury and the loss of the golden days. He will smile and say, “That’s what I thought,” and then they will be right back where they started. Maybe even further back.

_Why wasn’t it even a question?_ But then he will raise an eyebrow and ask, “Did you have something to say?” and what’s the point in answering now? It will not undo her transformation to complain. So she stays quiet.

_Why were you in Ashland?_  But she is afraid of the answer, afraid that it might be something like the things Charles Evenson would say to her. She cannot bear to imagine that she will be trapped with Charles for eternity. So she stays quiet.

_What have you done to me?_  But Carlisle has a way with words, manipulating them until you’re not even sure what you were saying and you think you were the one who wronged him. She is sick of being manipulated until she no longer knows her own mind. So she stays quiet.

There are so many questions Esme wants to ask him. She asks none of them.

.

.

.

Eventually, she lets go of the questions. It stops mattering.

.

.

.

Rosalie struggles, the poor girl.

She’s screaming and screaming for the first few years, lapsing in and out of angry fits where she goes from vacant expressions to throwing objects in moments. Sometimes, Esme will go to her room to call her downstairs and find her listless, lying about in bed. She spends so much time in the shower.

Esme wants to tell her that she understands the emptiness, but she does not have the words for that. Instead, she tries the same idea that had saved her at first. She brings her pretty things, items of luxury that are full of color and dazzlingly bright. She pushes them into her hands and urges, Just try it, knowing that once Rosalie does, she will find a kind of peace.  

She sees Rosalie stare at herself in the mirror, and she knows she has brought her salvation, and she smiles.

.

.

.

They say that you can discover yourself at college. You’ll figure out your passions, you’ll change your life’s course. You will broaden your horizons and discover a whole new world.

She tries going back, once she hears. She’s always loved school — it’s part of why she wanted to be a teacher. But Carlisle keeps a careful watch. He sits down at the table when she’s choosing her courses and says, “You must be careful, Esme. They cannot learn our secret.”

“I know, she says, as her hand strays to classes on the education.

Then his hand folds over hers. “No,” he tells her, the gentleness hiding the iron beneath his voice. “These people are learners. They notice things. They are too dangerous to be around.”

He flips open to the arts section. “These are better for you,” he said.

She wants to do something, anything, so she signs up for them anyways. Photography, art, architecture. Beauty, beauty, beauty, and she wonders if it will save her. Even if beauty itself has not, perhaps the creation of beauty will do something different.

She goes to classes and searches for meaning. Her search is in vain.

.

.

.

“I only want to protect you,” and he looks into her eyes.

“No one else will understand you, Esme,” and he smiles like an angel.

“Everyone will think you’re strange,” and he leads her to bed.

.

.

.

Esme dreams.

In her dreams, she is happy and healthy and growing old, her baby now eight and fourteen and twenty. She feels the aches and creaks in her joints, she sees her hair turning grey, and she knows she is not in limbo. It gives her a feeling of such delirious joy.

And then she wakes up with Carlisle, and everything resettles.

She stays with him because Carlisle is a reminder of the good old days, the giddiness of youth and her idealized infatuation of the handsome doctor who’d visited her farm. He is a relic from the days where nothing hurt. But she does not love him so much as she loves what he symbolizes. She craves the quiet in her head and is addicted to the light. Her marriage is nothing more than a way to keep those bound to her.

She still doesn’t know what Carlisle did to her, and she doesn’t think she wants to. Finding out would destroy the fragile remains of Esme Platt.

But on the outside, she is not fragile. On the outside, she smiles and laughs and lives a life of perfect bliss. Perfect husband, lovely children, all the riches and pleasures money can buy. In reality, everything is meaningless. She pretends because she needs something to do, something to fill out the long stretch of time into infinity.

It is probably unhealthy. None of it matters anymore.

Rosalie, dear Rosalie, has let all of this kill her inside. Esme, on the other hand, floats far, far away from it all, her mind high in the sky even while her body wanders the earth. Untouchable.


End file.
